Non-isothermal micromechanical resonators

In this work, we study the effect of non-isothermal operation on beam-type micromechanical resonators. A double ended tuning fork (DETF) resonator was studied under a linearly varying temperature profile along the length of the beam. We present models which show that for a constant center temperature of the beams, increasing the linear temperature gradient along the DETF substantially increases the quality factor (Q), with marginal effect on frequency. We also find that it is possible to use non-isothermal operation to improve quality factor in MEMS resonator based ovenized reference oscillators.